Capturing and collecting images, whether still or video, is commonly used to maintain memories of events, people etc. With the advent of digital image and video capture, an image repository may contain many hundreds or thousands of images and/or video clips. The prior art is thus replete with disclosures which teach of organisation methods for images. A common method is for images to be stored and organised in ‘albums’ or ‘boxes’, either electronically or otherwise. Other forms of organisation exist. For example, a collection of images may be arranged into a montage, and electronic photo montage organisational systems are known, as well as more conventional photo-montage albums.
Constructing a photo montage is, however, time consuming, and even the electronic versions which can use templates still require a significant investment in terms of the time spent by a user in arranging images in a pleasing and desired manner using such a template. For example, a small collection of 15 images can be arranged in approximately 15! (15 factorial) ways with a fixed template, and without cropping of individual images. Hence, electronic montage image organisation systems in which images are ‘clicked and dragged’ into desired positions are time consuming to use effectively, which can thus detract from the positive experience of arranging images.
Other systems, such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,288,719 attempt to alleviate the problem by providing low resolution sticker sheets onto which high resolution images are arranged by hand on a template page, and subsequently scanned into a computer system. A high resolution image montage is produced according to the positioning of the low resolution stickers. The solution is, however, still relatively time consuming, and is not practicable for digital images.
Other solutions more appropriate for digital images involve the use of rule driven systems. The systems automatically arrange a set of images into a montage using a set of rules which are arranged to categorise and/or rank images based on certain image attributes such as size, content, saliency etc. The systems do not however exploit the knowledge of the user, and so any information relating to the images in this regard is lost. For example, a user may associate two or more images with each other, and wish to place these close by in a montage—a rule based system would not be aware of this, and the link could therefore be lost.
Other, less sophisticated electronic arrangement systems exist, in which images are permitted to be swapped around by a user for example. This is still a time consuming process when the choice of images is large, and can detract from the overall experience.